The Polyglots (31 page)

And looking at this mixed assorted crew, I thought: why the devil should nations fight? The shallow imbecility of ‘alliances’, of this or that national friendship: all nations were too uncommon and too alike to warrant any natural camping based as it were on
personal preference. It was absurd. Yet they all behaved as though there were some real lasting advantage in such a stampede for safety. There were fools who advocated wars for economic reasons, and when, after the war, victors and vanquished alike rotted in the economic morass which the war had made, they forgot the economic argument (till they fomented a new war). It was incredible. No one wanted the war, no one with the exception of a score of imbeciles, and suddenly all those who did not want a war turned imbecile and obeyed the score of imbeciles who had made it, as if indeed there were no alternative to war—the simple common-sense alternative of, at any rate, not going to war about it, whatever happens: seeing that whatever happens cannot in the nature of the case be worse than war.

What a mixture we were, even within each nationality. The Russian batman Stanislav was more of a Pole than a Russian; Brown was more of a Canadian than an American; Gustave more of a Fleming than a Walloon, and I—well, you know who I am. And—to make the gathering more truly representative of the late World War—there was a youthful British officer, one of those young and simple and good chaps who, in wars waged for freedom, civilization, the avengement of national honour, the suppression of tyranny, the restoration of law and order, and such-like blood-exacting sacred causes, are freely sacrificed by the thousand, and their conception of the world is a vague sense that something is wrong somewhere and that somebody ought to be hanged.

So they set off to their doom, cheerfully, on the off-chance that their foe is that evil whose blood they are after, and having set out on their righteous (and adventurous) cause they now care but little about the origin of the wrong. And so they set out to kill and maim, and to be killed and maimed in turn, cheerfully, in the ‘old bean’ sort of fashion. Their mode of thinking, their manner of talking, is at one with the state of their soul. They go about asking everybody all day long: ‘Do barmaids eat their young?’ They strike on a happy phrase like ‘You’re all shot to pieces’, and
it becomes a sort of standing sentence applicable to any person at any given moment. Or they pick up some phrase like ‘The odd slab of bread’, and then go on referring to ‘The odd slab of beer’, ‘The odd slab of sleep’, ‘The odd slab of wash’, and the odd slab of everything. Their conversation deteriorates into relating to each other in the morning the number of whisky-and-sodas they have consumed the night before.

‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General.

The band played a flourish.

Sylvia and Gustave kissed.

I have often read in novels and I have heard it said ‘How prettily she laughs’, and it has always left me cold, because I could not conceal the thought of the underlying artificiality of such a pretty laugh. A laugh to be pretty, it seemed to me, must be natural and unconscious. But now, though I had seen her laugh no end of times before, I thought with eagerness, I thought in exultation: ‘How prettily she laughs!’

What a beauty, what a treasure, for sure, I was giving away. And to whom, of all people! How stupid. To miss one’s happiness by worse than an oversight, to surrender heedlessly the one thing that one should have kept. And the devils of hell, ten thousand strong, hissed into my ear from every hidden crevice of my brain: ‘You have missed your chance, missed it! missed it! missed! missed! missed!’

‘Bitter!’ shouted the General.

Sylvia and Gustave kissed.

The band played a flourish.

Facing me sat Harry, and suddenly he asked:

‘Where is God? Is He everywhere?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Is He in this bottle?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But how has He got in with the cork on?’

‘He was there, I suppose, before the bottle was made.’

‘But how is it He hasn’t got drowned in the wine?’

‘He can exist anywhere, I suppose.’

‘But I can’t see Him,’ said he, peering through the Château Lafitte 1900.

‘Nor can I,’ I confessed, ‘as yet.’

But having found an opening, Harry would not shut up any more, and for the rest of the meal kept pestering us with questions, such as: ‘Is the halo fastened to God’s head with an elastic?’ Or ‘What would God do if a big tiger suddenly rushed at Him?’ Or, descending to a lower plane, ‘Why can’t you chew milk?’

Dr. Murgatroyd had just arrived, after a particularly trying journey, travelling six thousand versts from Omsk in an old cattle-truck without springs. In the present state of things it was indeed a rare occasion when the train did not stop every few versts in consequence of some congestion on the line. But as it happened, Dr. Murgatroyd’s truck had been hooked on to the special train of a certain combative general who was grimly intent on making his way through to Harbin with as few stops as possible, and to make his determination more grimly felt by others he had an armoured train in front of him and another at the back of him. And Dr. Murgatroyd, seated for days on end on the floor of his cattle-truck, alone amid shells of sunflower seeds and peel of oranges—the sole food on which he lived—careless and indifferent as he was, he yet prayed to heaven that the train might stop if only for a moment. But the warlike general, in his grim determination, voted otherwise, and so seated and shaken to pieces, Dr. Murgatroyd finally arrived in Harbin. When the door of the cattle-truck was pulled open, the railway authorities beheld the curious spectacle of Dr. Murgatroyd, unshaven and unwashed, lying on an enormous heap of sunflower seed shells and orange peels, perusing a book. Dr. Murgatroyd had intended to give a lecture at the local Institute on the subject of the Union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches, but, cruelly shaken by the journey in the cattle-truck, he hesitated.

‘And what was Omsk like just before the evacuation? I can well imagine!’ asked Captain Negodyaev at the dinner-table.

Dr. Murgatroyd expressed a look of ominous significance. ‘These days,’ said he, ‘we live on a volcano.’

‘Very truly said. I have myself two daughters, Dr. Murgatroyd, and I feel anxious for their future. Màsha, poor thing, is married. But Natàsha is here. That is Natàsha over there.’

Dr. Murgatroyd looked across the table absently and pitched his fork into a sardine.

‘I regret that in the present unsettled state of affairs her education is being neglected. But then she is still only eight, and already speaks English like a native.’

‘That is very necessary,’ said Dr. Murgatroyd. ‘A closer knowledge of the two languages will inevitably draw the two countries together and facilitate the reunion of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. At Omsk I had a conversation with Metropolitan Nicholas and Archimandrite Timothy, and both ecclesiastics seemed struck with what I had to say.’

The Russian national cause had swayed to and fro with the territory held, the champions of that cause, irrespective of the fortunes of war, losing increasingly national colour through support by foreign troops, and the champions of the Revolution gaining it by their defence of the centre, the historic citadels of real Russia against foreign ‘invaders’; in addition, they had the revolutionary cause undisputed. And one began to ask: Who are the
Russians
? The masses outnumbered their ancient leaders. They had their own leaders. The ancient leaders found that they had no one to lead. Their Russian national cause was now a void cause: its Russian nationalism having deserted to the enemy with the ground itself, leaving a labelled carcass. The ancient leaders became crusaders on the coast: their cause was a lost cause, in addition to which it became a personal cause and an international militarist cause. It was, I think one may safely say, a hopeless cause, with the bottom knocked out of it. The tug-of-war was a rout. The revolutionaries had won the national Russian cause in addition to their own revolutionary one.

It is like this that the Russian Revolution presents itself today.
But at the time of happening it was a conglomeration of disorderly incidents, of vile crimes and arbitrary acts, of petty vanities and senseless cruelties, of good intentions frequently misplaced and more frequently misunderstood, and people meaning often the same thing mutually intent on murder. It was thus that the Revolution affected Dr. Murgatroyd and many others of his outlook; and for the disorderly clamour of long-suppressed urgencies and the growing chaos in the economic life they refused to recognize this tempestuous movement as at all inevitable, but ascribed it to the follies of this or that politician, to the work of German or Jewish ‘agitators’, or regarded it as a bad joke.

Dr. Murgatroyd had been a busy figure in those days at Omsk. He had conducted, with considerable vehemence, an anti-Bolshevik propaganda, and in his zeal and fervour had overstrained his object. He had painted the Bolsheviks in colours at once so black and lurid, made their atrocities appear so extravagant and flamboyant in their ghastliness, that when the Siberian soldiers, whom it was his task to whip up into a fight against the Soviets, beheld the pamphlets which Dr. Murgatroyd turned out for their consumption, they were seized by a panic. ‘No! if they’re as bad as that,’ said they, ‘we’re off’—and deserted in battalions. Dr. Murgatroyd had made the Kolchak cause his own. At that most critical time, when the fate of Omsk hung in the balance, he was invited to attend an extraordinary sitting of the Council of Ministers in order to take part in the debate as to the possible evacuation of the city, and Dr. Murgatroyd, not a military gentleman, had made a speech in Russian, drawing the attention of the ministers to the lamentable condition of the city gardens, and suggesting that the British representatives might be approached in order that a few experts in garden-planning might be dispatched without delay from England—a country which, as Dr. Murgatroyd explained, excelled in that particular art. His untimely solicitude on behalf of the city in process of evacuation was not fully appreciated by the members of the council, for it appeared they had some difficulty in understanding his Russian,
so much so, that when at the close of this memorable sitting he walked up to a venerable grey-haired general to ask him what he thought of the speech which he, Dr. Murgatroyd, had made in Russian the venerable general, with a charming smile, expressed regret at having in his youth neglected the study of the English tongue, in consequence of which he was rather at a loss to catch the meaning of everything that Dr. Murgatroyd had, no doubt, so wisely and admirably expressed.

‘I want to give up journalism,’ said Dr. Murgatroyd, ‘and go into politics seriously, on my return to England.’

I said nothing. I thought: in so large, clumsy, inaccurate, uncertain, fumbling, blundering, blustering a body as politics, one fool more or less does not matter.

‘And what will you do after the war now that you are grown up, Alexander?’ Sylvia asked.

‘What would you like me to do?’

She thought for a while. ‘You don’t like militarism. Well, in that case I should like you to go into the Navy.’

‘Of course there’s the uniform—travels in foreign parts—dances—flagships—eguilettes. But to think of it, that a man should go to the trouble of being born, reared, educated, for one sole purpose in life: to drive a hole in another people’s vessel and send it to the bottom of the sea. In anticipation of that task he reads and writes, plays and loves, but all this is merely an interlude, a diversion in which he indulges till comes the grand proud moment of his life: he drives a hole in some other people’s vessel and sends it to the bottom of the sea.’

‘You are angry,’ she said.

I was angry: I visualized ‘
le sabre de mon père
’, and then I looked at Gustave. Why did I let another have her? Terrestrial love is not for ever—perhaps once in all eternity. I suddenly began to think: she is disgusted with me because I did not ignore, did not overrule her problem of deciding between happiness and sacrifice by simply taking her away. If not for this dilemma, these subversive solaces, I could have sat now beside her who was my
love. What hypocrisy my pretending I was debarred from acting thus by considerations of my aunt. Why was I not of the Stone Age when I could have clubbed my aunt and carried Sylvia away? I had given up my precious claim—I who could have moulded her to my will. She was like wax—and like wax she had been moulded by what?—by the sloppy selfishness of Aunt Teresa! Oh, it was not easily to be borne. It was not to be borne!

Love is kindled by the wind of the imagination, blazed into a consuming flame by these trivial, unreasoning, and utterly contemptible twin-brothers—regret and jealousy—who are yet stronger than the human will. Stronger because they have secured an unfair leverage upon it. As a child can lead a bull by the ring in his nostrils, so they, too, fasten to the nerve centres, as it were, of human happiness and pain—and conquer shamelessly. It isn’t strength of will, nor the visible amount of damage wrought in you; it’s the particular leverage by which pain digs up your soul that matters. And the leverage by which I was made to suffer out of all proportion to my loss was the thought that it had been entirely my fault that there was any loss at all. So far our relations had been as simple as those of a cock and his consort. All I did was to say: ‘Cock-cock-cock-cockoricoo!’ And Sylvia after me: ‘Cock-cock-cock-cockoricoo!’The same trait I observed in Harry and Nora. What he said, she said. And even when I quoted something like:

Sylvia, though she neither knew nor cared whence this quotation came, would echo gladly:

I hungered for her being. I was jealous of myself, of the days when I strutted about like a cock and she followed me like a pet hen and echoed all my sounds. And the thought occurred to me: that in eternal hell nothing but our memory will be left us to tease us over that which we had wilfully denied ourselves in life.